It was a unique time back in the late 90s, and those guys had their finger on the pulse of internet nerdom. It was pre-Facebook, pre-"Web 2.0" pre a lot of things. In a lot of ways Slashdot was the spiritual predecessor to Hacker News, so we owe that crew a debt.
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom—I think he attended Hope College with the Slashdot guys as well?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules. I'd hate to be maintaining any of the code we wrote then now though!
IIRC they recorded sporadically around 1999 and 2000, just talking about whatever had been on the front page recently. I've thought about doing a sort of retrospective, listening to each one and writing a blog post about what they found interesting... it's a neat peek back at a different time and a different culture.
People still have interest in philosophy, free Internet and so forth.
Nothing is gone, it's just been made a bit less obvious.
I would also include, along with Everything2, (I recall a guy named Tim Vroom?) its sister site PerlMonks.org. Man, I spent a lot of time there learning Perl and reading up on CPAN modules.
They were never bad people to be around.
(used 'The Alchemist' as a username - probably because I was into reading about it at the time. Unfortunately most people probably thought I liked that book of the same name).
I went to a meetup in Melbourne. Met a girl in Chicago. Discovered that someone else lived literally on my street, a third of a mile away. I had several small world experiences on E2.
The ability to create amusing nodeshells, or posts that were just ASCII pictures of a fish swimming from a shark ("The birth of leadership"), or poems, or in-depth analysis of some interesting idea or thing.
Everything2 was where I first made real content on the web, and was proud of what I created. Like a precursor to answers on Stack Overflow (or other SE sites).
I've just checked and felt a warm feeling in my heart seeing that the website is still up, and not only that, but I can even login into my account that hadn't been used since 2002 or so (didn't remember my username, but the account is tied to an email account that I've had since around 1997 (!) so it was easy to recover).
I might write again from time to time...
Thanks for mentioning it!
PS: How can one have such fond memories of something locked in the brain stored somewhere, and only remember them when someone mentions it? I wonder how many nice memories from that time are still lost somewhere in my head.